Life and Action is a work of serious and sustained conceptual analysis. It is a work of philosophy in the tradition of Aristotle, Frege and Anscombe, three philosophers who play a particularly important role in Thompson's own thinking. Taken as a whole, Life and Action is uncommonly rich philosophical fare. It is an invigorating and challenging read. Thomspon's arguments are clear and cogent, but are so densely packed and so detailed that it is easy to lose one's bearings. However, unlike many works of densely written, closely argued professional academic philosophy, this one has the potential to be well worth the effort for anyone who is genuinely interested in thinking clearly about fundamental concepts of human action, as opposed to being of interest merely to academic philosophers.

The book is divided into four parts, an introduction and three sizable and relatively freestanding essays, each of which investigates a different bundle of concepts. The first essay focuses on the concepts of lifeform, vital process, and organism; the second investigates the concepts of doing something intentionally, of wanting to do something, and of having a reason for doing something; the third takes up the concepts of a social practice and of a disposition to do a certain sort of thing as these might figure as a reason for doing something.

The Introduction itself is useful reading. In it, Thompson offers a genuinely illuminating account of how the three sets of concepts he discusses in the essays are hooked together. In addition to being of interest in its own right, this discussion provides a view of the forest that is especially welcome on account of the rare density of the trees into which Thompson leads the reader. The introduction also contains Thompson's relatively detailed discussion of his method of philosophical engagement, including some very illuminating remarks about how he understands his debts to Anscombe, Aristotle, and Frege.

Thompson's primary goal in the first essay, "The Representation of Life," is to suggest that life marks a logically distinct category of thought. To have the concept of life, to be able to think of things as alive and as engaged in some vital activity or other, is not to grasp some set of characteristics that mark living things off from rocks, trees, or raindrops. To have the concept of life is rather, he suggests, to be able to understand and work with such judgments as "The mayfly breeds before dying," which, as we all know, is consistent with the claim that most mayflies die before mating. By reflecting on an impressive number of examples of judgments of the same sort, Thompson does an excellent job of making his claim both clear and compelling.

In the second essay, "Naïve Action Theory," Thompson pursues the question whether it is possible to have the idea of a reason for doing something or of having a rational ground for one's action, if we didn't have the idea of wantingto do something. The question, in other words, is whether wanting is necessarily involved in explaining actions with reasons. Or again, whether the stuff of practical rationality belongs to psychology. His answer is no; to have a concept of a reason for doing something does not require that one have a concept of wanting. His argument turns on certain contrasts between various familiar forms that typical statements in which we give a reason for action tend to take. We have a "naïve" form, "She is doing A because she is doing B," on one hand, and on the other, a whole battery of "sophisticated" forms: "She is doing A because she wants to (intends to, is trying to, hopes to, plans to) do B." By drawing attention to (again) grammatical and logical characteristics of these two categories of justification, he provides a surprisingly compelling argument for the conceptual primacy of the naïve form. This, it seems to me, is a pretty interesting result. For the upshot of the argument, if I understand it, is that the study of human rational action is not the property of psychology – not at least in its essentials.

In the final essay, "Practical Generality," Thompson investigates the concepts of a social practice and a practical disposition (a disposition to keep one's promises, for example). The question here is what practices and dispositions are, or rather what they must be, if they are to function as freestanding, ethical-making justifications of our actions (if, that is, "I promised I would" is not only really a reason to do something, but an ethically sound reason to do the thing). The distinctively philosophical difficulty here can perhaps be made out bringing to mind the contrast between the acts of a person who keeps her promises "just because" she promised, and the acts of a person who does what she promised because she was going to do that thing anyway, or because she thought it would be a fun thing to do. The first promise-keeper acts well, certainly. But how so? What is good about what she does? The intuitively gripping answer is that it is the excellence of the practice that makes the first person's actions cases of acting well. But surely, not just any old social arrangement can do that. (On the disposition side, the parallel would be that not any tendency to do a certain sort of thing "because it's my tendency" could make the things done cases of acting well.) This is the problem. Thompson's discussion again directs us to consider the idea that when it seems clear that the practice or disposition is itself what makes the individual action good, we are implicitly working with a certain basic form of practical generality. Where many agents' many actions are so formed, we have the relevant sort of social practice. Where a single agent's many actions are so formed, we have the relevant sort of disposition.

This is not the place to engage in substantive discussion and critique of the individual arguments. It must suffice to suggest that there is much here that ought to interest the reflective practitioner of empirical investigations of human beings individually and collectively as well as the student of practical philosophy. Three essays together form a sort of triptych; they are three panels unified by the common suggestion that there is serious conceptual analysis to do in areas of our thinking that we might easily assume to be entirely empirical. The first essay delves into the basic concepts of life form, of an organism and of a vital part or process. The second essay shows that we work with a concept of doing something for a reason that cannot be understood in terms of empirical psychology. The final essay makes clear that we have concepts of a social practice and of a practical disposition, which do not derive from any of the empirical social sciences. In all three cases, the suggestion is that these fundamental concepts provide the frame on which to hang our empirically grounded theories.

Lauren Tillinghast has a private practice in philosophical counseling in New York City. She teaches courses exploring the connections between philosophy and the messy business of ordinary life at New York University and is the managing editor of the journal Philosophical Practice. Her doctorate in philosophy is from the University of Chicago, and she has taught there as well as at the University of Pittsburgh and Knox College.

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